Elegance in coding is a worthy goal in and of itself. There's no need for computers to be slow to make us write elegant code. Elegant code does not only run better, it also tends to be easier to read and easier to debug. I think if our computers would indeed become 1000 times faster, we would still feel the need to write elegant code.

I totally agree. I'm just saying that there's a difference between having something working and being able to leave it at that, and needing to go over your code again and again and again to try and optimize it for a slower computer. For people who are more art-oriented than code-oriented, that can be a bit of a damper when developing, in the same way that having to fuss over their assets for slower computers can be.

Bit shocked that there is so little love for the craft. When a artist hammers into his sculpture causing it to break, should he complain that marble isn't strong enough .. or get some more practice?

I think a lot of us are interested in the "craft" of writing good code, but not as interested as we are in creating the end product that we envision.

At least, that's how it is for me: I'm fascinated by programming, and enjoy an elegant and efficient piece of code as much as the next person, but there's only so much time in a day, and I'd generally rather spend my time working on the big picture--what people are actually going to interact with--rather than trying to improve the efficiency of my code or assets.

If you have a good look at the time we spend on programming these days, you will see that most of that time is spent on getting the computer to run the things that we want to make. I wouldn't call wanting to reduce this time laziness. On the contrary. Faster computers could liberate us from many mundane tasks -work that the computer should be doing for us in the first place. The kind of creativity required to negotiate with a machine is not the kind I am interested in. I want to communicate with people instead. And put all my energy in that.

Hear hear.

Gorgeous. I also wish I had an iPhone so I could play it! Can I ask what you made this in? Any possibility of a PC port?

Hey, Chris, glad to see you here!

Just watched Once, another great film about "being." Damn, I wish I could make a game that would convey something of what comes through in that movie.

Yes, I very much agree. Especially with:

Many videogames already offer this. But most of them disrupt the experience by demanding that you play their game.

I'm trying to think of a commercial game that I've played for which this has not been true, and I'm pretty much coming up blank. The forced gameplay always interferes with the experience at some point.

Glad to see you here, Rez! And don't worry about your English at all: heck, I could barely tell you weren't a native speaker!

I'm right there with you Michaël: as I've already said, I absolutely agree that categories can be applied too quickly, and I appreciate your continued cautionary words.

[the mundane]

What I got out of Ian's article was that the interactive medium could explore the mundane much better than film could. Film is about seeing, videogames can be about being. Though my favourite films (Parajanov, Godard, Bergman, etc) are much closer to being and the mundane than most videogames (which are mostly just spectacles of the extraordinary)...

Maybe the difference is that videogames can deal with the mundane and still be entertaining, while such films are often hard to stay awake on (which I have defined as a norm for me: if I fall asleep on a film, it must be good! ; come to think of it, I do a similar thing with games: I scan for the word "boring" in reviews, when I find it, I buy the game instantly -but that probably says more about game journalists than anything else).

In videogames, I think it's the exploration that makes the difference. Which I guess is served by continuity better than editing.

I love those directors as well, and I'm very interested with the idea of exploring the "mundane" with videogames/notgames.

Film is about seeing, videogames can be about being.

This quote really jumps out at me. I'm quite fond of the existential philosophers, and this idea excites me, I guess.

As you may have guessed, I have no interest in categorizing Passage. And I don't want "notgames" to ever have a nature. Notgames should be a design attitude, not a category. And Passage was definitely not designed with a Notgames attitude. I have spoken with Jason Rohrer enough to know that this is not where his interests lie. I think Passage was an honest attempt to express something through game rules.

Looking back over this discussion, I'm not sure what my point was regarding Passage. I certainly am not trying to say that we can or should put it in a box, which is evidently what came across, so I apologize for my failure to communicate.

I'm not sure how we got into a discussion on whether it is a game or is a notgame, as I'm no more interested in categorizing it for the sake of categorizing it than you are, Michaël. Going back to my very first post, the reason I brought Passage up to begin with is simply that it had an impact on me, and helped me see how we can achieve beautiful things by breaking with traditional game design, which seemed (at the time, anyway) related to the notgames idea.

The "concrete" discussion section would be Reference: http://notgames.org/forum/index.php?board=11.0

Thanks GaP: I've been looking over those threads.


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As an aside, I think you're absolutely right, Michaël, that the notgames idea is most useful as a catalyst for creation and change. I think that could be said of most ideas: they are most useful in so far as they are practical and energizing. Once we start using ideas to categorize and "explain," and chop up the world into neat little boxes, we're in danger of losing a lot of what's there. Losing the experience, as it were, to preconceived and stale categories of our minds. So I agree with your focus, and I'm glad that you keep reminding us of it. I agree, when you say in another thread, on playing games/notgames, "What is important is whether we enjoyed it or not, whether we found it meaningful, beautiful, innovative, inspiring, etc." All that being said, I don't think it's possible for notgames to remain only a design challenge, and not a "category," as nice as that may be.

Forget about notgames for a minute, and categorizing a particular interactive experience, and let's just talk about how we understand things as humans. We experience things with our senses, right? And if we're really in touch with our senses, and really "unpolluted" we may be able to get a very clear impression or feeling when we experience something. But without any kind of vocabulary or grid or categorization we can't understand that experience very well. I am not saying in the least that our solution to all of this is putting Passage or any other interactive creation in a box! I'm just saying that as human beings, we understand this way: by language, vocabulary, grammar, grids, categories. The problem, as I've already said (and  I think you agree?), is that as soon as we apply ANY of this to our experience, we lose something of the experience itself. This is the classic issue Buechner describes so well in A Sacred Journey: as soon as we call a tree a tree we gain some understanding about the world and about ourselves, but we also lose the thing that the tree was before we labeled it a tree!

What I'm trying to say here is that I don't think that this quantifying business is quite as simple as you make it out to be ("don't do it!"): I don't think a category-free, label-free utopia exists, because for some reason as humans we really do need these things in order to understand and think and develop. I think the challenge is, once we have all our "great" categories etc., to somehow get back some of that pre-category experience that we had. Maybe it's a cycle: we make categories, then we need to break them and blur them; then we make new ones, and the cycle repeats...

Of course none of our categories and quantifications are "real"--I absolutely agree with you on that (To say x is a game, or is a notgame doesn't reflect some kind of primal reality). But our lives are chock full of them nonetheless--heck, our whole language depends on them. That's not to say that we should try and exacerbate the problem--just that we're thickly entangled in it.

So I think notgames will become a category, if it's not already, and I don't necessarily think that's a terrible thing. People will consider notgames as a category not because they are trying to be evil, but just because they are trying to think about meaning and games, and what's possible. About what's impacted them, and what hasn't, and what can be done, and how one experience is different or similar from another. Because that's what we do, as humans interacting with our world--all I have to do is look over the posts in these forums to see that.

Just my 2 cents.

I totally agree that the fact that an art work was created by a human is very important. The thing that bothers me is that people often seem to think that the art work is about this particular human, this artist. That the work is about them and about their life and about their opinions. And that experiencing art is about figuring out what the artist was trying to say. In my experience (both as creator and as audience) this is a completely wrong way to approach art.

Art can indeed very often make us feel connected to other humans. But not necessarily to the creator of the piece. He/she is just a channel, a medium, a person who happens to have a talent for expressing things that concern us as a society, as a species. The work, however, is about this society, this species, not about the creator. And as such, the viewer has as much right to derive meaning from it as the creator.

I agree with you, Michaël.

See, I'm not even sure to what extent we're disagreeing here, because we're not discussing whether Passage is a game, or is a notgame, but to what extent it is a game, or not: I think we all acknowledge that it employs some elements from games, but the question is whether it deserves to be categorized as a game, or not. 

I just think it's more helpful to call Passage a notgame than it is to call it a game, just as it is more helpful to call the creation above a sculpture, rather than a chair. One could call it a chair, and argue at length as to why it is a chair, because of how it shares characteristics x, y, and z with chairs. But to do so would ignore the very important distinctions that set it apart from most chairs.

Also, I feel that whether you can "play" Passage (as a game) or not is very much a subjective distinction. I've played Passage multiple times, but it has never once felt like a game to me, nor have I felt like I was "playing" it, so much as experiencing it.

I agree with both of you (Michaël and GaP) that Passage employs structural elements from games. I just think it is also missing key structural elements that games typically posses, and for that reason I see it as more of a notgame than a game.

I'm sorry if this discussion is too semantic/semeiotic for you Michaël... my intention is not to be focused on irrelevant semantic details, but rather to increase my understanding of the interactive medium, and the nature of games and notgames by examining a concrete example, like Passage (I think it would be cool to have a thread dedicated to such "concrete" discussion of particular games/notgames -- would it be okay to start a thread like that, or would I be burned at the stake? ).

I value your input greatly, and I think we agree more than perhaps is clear... I think our disagreements may in fact be mostly semantic, but that realization can only come about through having discussions like this one.

All great art is about the reader/viewer/listener/player, not about the creator.

I agree with this to a large extent, but not quite to the extreme that you seem to be taking it. I think a lot of the beauty and meaning in art, at least as I have experienced it, comes from a sort of dialog that's created between the creator and the reader/viewer/listener/player.

Personally, I can never completely forget that any created work that I interact with was in fact created by someone; and that knowledge, while it doesn't dominate or determine my experience, always seems to enrich it. Art, for me, is to a large extent about the fact that we're not alone: that there are other people out there, creating things, trying to express things, trying to spread ideas or convey feelings or just make things for the heck of it. That doesn't mean that the meaning of a piece is pre-determined, or that the meaning is even constructed by the creator, but it does mean that the existence of the creator is significant -- at least for me.

The beauty of interactive art, from my standpoint, is that it really opens up the dialog in an explicit way: concedes that the viewer/player really is as much (or more) a part of the dialog as the creator is. We've been saying as much when it comes to literature and other traditional art forms for a long time, but videogames/notgames force the concession to be real (and I find it ironic that so many critics of film and literature etc., who have been espousing the significance of the viewer and the constructed nature of meaning for decades, find it so difficult to accept the idea of interactive artwork).


Oh, and thanks Visiontrick for posting this.

Thanks ghostwheel! I like your meme.... or is it meant to be taken ironically?